What is it?

Just a couple of years ago, only the largest utilities could offer Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment (EBPP).  Now, you can link your self-hosted or third-party-hosted website to a secure, hosted site that presents your bills and allows your customers to pay their bills online.  Your customers may also sign up to pay with credit card or e-check.

Once the integration from your web site is set up, your customers will be able to log on securely and view their current and prior bills, make payments and request various services from your Customer Service staff, including recurring ACH or Credit Card payments, Move Outs, and other services.  Payment processing has been audited by a third party to verify that it is secure.

In addition to the customer interaction, you have control over the style on the hosted site, so that it matches your current site.  There are one-time costs to set up Bill Presentment, as well as ongoing costs for Presentment, Enrollment, Payment Processing and Web Hosting.

How does it work?

When you create your bills, you may either outsource their printing and processing, or simply export your data so that it may be captured for presentment.  The captured data is then available to your customers by seamlessly linking your website to the presentment site, which handles all the complexity and security of customer login, bill presentment, and optional online payment.  You do not have to bother with your own Security Certificates or maintaining secure logins for your customers.

Whenever a customer decides to make use of your online bill presentment, they may simply create a login to your secure site.  If you are also outsourcing your bills, your customer will use a special code that is only available on the bill.  They may then request service and/or pay their bill(s) online.  After payments are processed, you will receive a file that you then import into BillMaster, completing the interface loop.

How do you Manage it?

Your hosted website includes an Enterprise View which allows customer service access for research and retrieval of any statement or range of statements – a sort of “online archive statement view”.  Enterprise View also provides administrative access to the enrolled user database for adding/editing/deleting users.  This is useful as well to enroll “walk in” customers for EPayMyBill.com right at your office. User access security level may also be managed (User / CSR / Manager / Administrator etc).